One More Second
by Amalin
Summary: A Yui monologue. Random thoughts after she becomes priestess.


**One More Second**   
- A Yui Monologue -

  


There are spiderweb scrawls across the dust, ages of worlds lying forgotten on the floor. Discarded they lie, the memories we buy, like a little kid's balloon at the circus that eventually ends up above the clouds. What happens to those balloons? Figuratively, they're always real somewhere, floating interminably above us. Little bobbing angels on strings. Flying...   
The clock ticks lazily, each passing second announced by what seems a tolling bell in the silence. Tick, tock. The time passes. Lives flash as seconds, tiny flares, miniscule sparks. They always fade.   
Sometimes, Time seems to stop, and I have to listen to make sure the seconds are still fleeing by. That's when the wind whistles outside, a mournful dirge, and it's calling me. That's when the shadows leap, and the night turns cold like ice. That's when the nightmares come, and the seconds are more comforting. I need a clock, need to hear it passing. Time never leaves me alone. All I need to know is, just one more second...   
Silence oozes, it drips like mud when there's no one else around. That's when every heartbeat rolls like thunder in my ears and I have to hold my breath to check. I'm real. This is real. No more shadows in the night to steal time away. It comes like a chant, a mantra I whisper in my own mind. I'm not alone...I'm not alone...I'm not alone! Sometimes I have to remind myself to breathe; or else maybe Time will go on without me. And I'll be forever stuck here, floating alone, an abandoned balloon in the sky. It's worse to be forgotten now than to be forgotten in the future. Time remembers. Time knows. Every particle of dust has a story.   
And me. What's my story? Yui Hongo, the former. The forgotten. Someone's best friend…once. Someone's almost-love…if only. The silence around me is filled with excuses, and they throb with the beating of my heart. Excuses as to why my seconds are filled with desolation, excuses as to why I bear them alone. But I'm not alone. Never alone.   
"You'll never have to bear that again," Nakago had assured me. Of course not. I'm a priestess now, the Seiryuu no Miko! I'm important. But important means nothing, it's one of those words that slips like water and disappears as if never real. Important, yes... but I was never important to important people.   
Seconds tick and I sigh, hearing them pass. Knowing that elsewhere, they pass and mean something, but here they are only more time wasted. Just one more second... I live in seconds that mean nothing to me. Silence cloaks the air as dark as the new moon.   
The moon, yes - turn away from the sun, Yui. Why have I bothered? I am nothing but a reflection. Even in full brilliance, the moon is shining only with the grace of the sun. And the stars - as inconsequential as the seconds that fall from the hands of the clock like particles of dust. Wasted. Discarded. Abandoned. The wind cries its haunting melody outside, and I am reminded of the insidious breezes of spring. Spring, when the cherry blossoms drift lazily, when the air is filled with sweetness. Summer, when the laughter of children rings to the heavens, echoing hollowly from the stars. Autumn, the moon in its haughty splendor, the land raped for its riches. I shudder at the word. My memories are not yet dust.   
Winter, then, completes the year. Winter, when the wind shakes like the howling of a wolf - a lone wolf, its cry soaring eerily from the barren hills. When I look from my window it does not matter how full in bloom the trees are, how luminous the moon. The seconds are indifferent. Perhaps I should be, too.   
Sometimes I wonder at Fate. How foolishly she casts her dice, how carelessly she plays! Children whose fingers slip from the strings of their balloons never stop to think. And so the discarded playthings wander, unnoticed, forever. How cruel she is sometimes, that Fate, in her childish games. Ruthless, perhaps, out of necessity. But with whom does she engage in these amusements? The master of Time himself? To him belong the seconds, which touch the hearts of all. Oh Fate, how coldly you cast me to this life. Am I to live with only the solace of each passing moment? What joy lies in counting the steps to your grave?   
The days are cold now, the sunshine weak like faded cloth. I block it out; turn my face from it. I will not be anyone's shadow! And then the nights are endless, each second lasting for millennia. It is the shadow reign that I can never bear alone. Too long, too long spent in company with the sun. Too late?   
I kneel in the faint scattering of moonbeams through the window, knees pressed hard against the floor. Teach me, I beg of the night. In the silence, my clock ticks. Show me. I will win.   
I will win. Miaka will see! I will never be her shadow again. Too many years had been spent, fooled by her words. The sun is only using the moon, using her to reflect the sun's light to the world in both night and day. No longer, I whisper to the seconds. My company. My guardians. I hold my own court of stars!   
The dust scatters as I rise, years passing before my feet as I cross the shrine. The floor is chilled against my skin, as cold as the moonbeams that have drifted inside. My feet stir whispers as I hold the clock between my hands, close to my heart. Is my heartbeat what makes the seconds tick, or is the fleeing of the seconds what urges my heart? I can feel both moving as I walk.   
Yui Hongo…the free. No more do I bend with every word that slips from the mind of someone else, no more do I fall with the seconds. I'm no one's shadow! I don't live in the seconds of another!   
I clutch the little clock in my fingers, leaning against the doors to the shrine. Seiryuu's symbol shines there, broken as I part the doors and step into the moon-bathed hallway. Night's hold on the world is still great, and the stars glitter distantly as the hands of my clock trace the same old paths. Oh, Miaka, Tamahome, why, why am I so alone now? I speak, tell myself that all is different. I am important, I am free...   
But the seconds still tick on, and the shadows still leap, and the dark reigns a little longer. Breathing in the silence, I remind myself, just one more second...and the nightmares will end.   
Yet somehow, my one second seems to last an eternity.   



End file.
